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Zodiac #2 (of 3) Posted 30 Aug 2009Writer: Joe Casey
Reviewed by Adam McGovern |
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In the midst of Marvel’s 70th Anniversary month, everyone was talking about a real-life arch-villain instead – the 40th deathday of the rose-tinted ’60s hit, with the Manson murders commemorated in every media corner and sundry sideshows like John Waters’ efforts to get one of the more minor killers paroled filling the electronic atmosphere. The middle of Joe Casey’s Zodiac mini couldn’t have been better timed, but since chaos wouldn’t be terrorizing if it kept to a schedule, this must be just one more random coincidence.
The basic principle of this Dark Reign tie-in is that absolute order breaks down absolutely, usually at the hands of the malcontents the system has inflamed or created. The real Manson was a psycho who came along at the moment there were real powers-that-be to fight, and Casey’s gang leader is out to bring down the national-security imperium of Norman Osborn not out of any civic nobility but because he chafes at authority and wishes to cut to the Darwinian chase of predatory glee that underlies all outwardly polite gunboat governing.
The real Manson was also an amateur compared to the Vietnam War-era establishment, a mistake Zodiac seems bent on avoiding, with massive civilian death tolls and chaos for its own sake, not any passé “aim” like wealth or influence. Not one to put too fine a point on anything, the madman’s soliloquies are peppered with Nixon-era pop-culture references, though a well-chosen cast including an obscure clown from the Ringmaster’s (media?) Circus of Crime and Zodiac’s literally death-worshipping girlfriend ensures that all explosive buttons of celebrity sadism are pushed from Gacy to Starkweather and beyond.
Comics have seen all kinds of assassinating brother and sisterhoods, but no one’s gotten into the psychology of a cult like Casey does here. He’s also got a great ear for the running lectures of egomaniac CEOs in Osborn’s proclamations of his leadership philosophy, words of wisdom mirrored in Zodiac’s addresses to his troops. It’s Casey’s crazy, cautionary power to make Zodiac sound like the one you could actually learn something from, and as with all the truly great dictators, Zodiac builds in a kernel of justification to wrap his rants around.
Frenetic rendering and trash-heap mise en scène from Nathan Fox well convey the psychic whitenoise and defiant undergroundish squalor of the story, its characters and its emotional tone. That the Manson clan is still behind bars and that a comic like this could ever get made are two signs of progress and real reasons to celebrate – so swig some champagne and surrender to Zodiac!